Warning

This week, millions of people are posting pictures of their kids with backpacks and first day of school clothes. It’s such a kick to see those eager young faces and their carefully chosen outfits that will one day serve as objects of extreme mortification, then amusement, then nostalgia and finally, inspiration for revivals. I wish I had a similar record of transformation of my kids’ rooms.

Deep in this underground shop stands a 7-foot-tall brontosaurus made mostly of chicken wire. Off to one side two iron beds with a past reveal worn coats of red paint. On a reclaimed wood table sits an enormous birdcage with no feathered creature in sight.

Home is a perspective. People can live inside the same four walls, sheltered by the same roof, sit around the same dining table and see different things. Or see the same things in entirely different ways.

I am a snoop by nature and profession. Part Harriet the Spy, part Lois Lane, and a pinch post-prison Martha Stewart, I take notes on other people's homes, write about them, and, occasionally, try to incorporate their nifty versions of domesticity into my own.

Several years ago at a friend’s house, I met a young woman married to a man old enough to be her father. She was beautiful. He was rich. She loved to dance. He claimed two left feet. She said she longed to go out dancing but her husband preferred to stay home. Now, I don’t like to think of myself as judgmental but I may as well have donned black robes and slammed a gavel as she leaned in to confide how they resolved their differences.